An industry-first initiative sees ukactive, Sport England, the Open Data Institute, Open Active and Legend Club Management Systems working together to enable deeper collaboration and data-sharing. ukactive’s Rob Gibson reports

Open Active, the sector-wide open data initiative that is funded by Sport England and led by the Open Data Institute (ODI) is one of the supporters of a new initiative from industry software business, Legend Club Management Systems.

The collaboration between Legend, Sport England and the ODI was brokered by Steven Ward, CEO of ukactive, who has been working to support the ambitions of the Open Active programme.

Legend has announced that it will enable all its customers to open their data for collaboration with third parties and ensure the adoption of open data standards to support the 1,700 facilities around the world that use its software. The aim is to maximise the potential of collaboration with third parties.

The announcement about the new initiative was made at Legend’s annual customer conference in October. Dave Newton, director of mass markets at Sport England and a speaker at the event said: “Sport England’s mission is to create an active nation, enabling everyone in the community to be active, irrespective of age, gender or social-demographic background.

“Supporting the sector to harness the power of digital innovation is a core part of fulfilling that strategy.

“We’re therefore delighted to be working in partnership with Legend to enable such a large proportion of the sector to open its data in this way, and make collaboration with third parties a question of business strategy, not technical possibilities.”

DIGITAL POTENTIAL
Richard Norris, programme manager for Open Active at the ODI, said: “Legend’s commitment is a major milestone for the initiative, and will make it much easier for leisure providers to make their data openly available so they can take advantage of major campaigns such as Change4Life, and collaborate where they can see a clear business or social reason to do so.

“Open Active has made a lot of progress in the past two years, but there are even more exciting moments ahead.”

Ward said: “I’ve got a long-term commitment to supporting the sector to realise its digital potential and I want to thank the team at Legend for making this commitment, and putting our sector in a stronger position to thrive.

“We’ve made more progress on digital and innovation in the past three years than in the 30 years that preceded it.

“Collaborations such as these indicate that we’re now presented with a range of technical partners in the sector that form a digital backbone to set us up for growth in years to come.”

REMOVING BARRIERS
Speaking at the recent launch of the initiative, Sean Maguire, managing director of Legend, said: “We live in an era of rapid change, where operators cannot be sure where the next innovation with the potential to grow their business will come from.

“We want to make collaboration a matter of business strategy and choice, by removing the barriers to collaboration.

“We’ve made this technically possible for all our clients, so it’s up to operators to decide how they take forward collaborations that have the potential to grow the reach of the sector.”